Nicholas of Cusa (1401 – 11 August 1464), also referred to as Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus (/kjuːˈseɪnəs/), was a Germanphilosopher, theologian, jurist, and astronomer. One of the first German proponents of Renaissance humanism, he made spiritual and political contributions in European history. A notable example of this is his mystical or spiritual writings on "learned ignorance," as well as his participation in power struggles between Rome and the German states of the Holy Roman Empire.

After the Archbishop Otto of Trier had died in 1430, Pope Martin V appointed the Speyer bishop Raban of Helmstatt his successor. Nevertheless, the Electorate was contested by opposing parties, and in 1432 Nicholas attended the Council of Basel representing the Cologne dean Ulrich von Manderscheid, one of the claimants,[4] who hoped to prevail against the new Pope Eugene IV. Nicholas stressed the determining influence of the cathedral chapter and its given right to participate in the succession policy, which even places the pope under an obligation to seek a consent. His efforts were to no avail in regard to Ulrich's ambitions; however, Nicholas' pleadings earned him a great reputation as an intermediary and diplomat. While present at the council, he wrote his first work, De concordantia catholica (The Catholic Concordance), a synthesis of ideas on church and empire balancing hierarchy with consent. This work remained useful to critics of the papacy long after Nicholas left Basel.[5]

Initially as conciliarist, Nicholas approached his university friend Cardinal Julian Cesarini, who had tried to reconcile pope and council, combining reform and hierarchic order. Nicholas supported transfer of the council to Italy to meet with the Greeks, who needed aid against the Ottoman Turks. He arbitrated in the conflict with the Hussites. Between the summer of 1437 and early 1438 he was a member of the delegation sent to Constantinople with the pope's approval to bring back the Byzantine emperor and his representatives to the papally summoned Council of Florence of 1439, which was attempting to bring the Eastern Orthodox Church into union with the Western Catholic Church. The reunion achieved at this conference turned out to be very brief. Nicholas would later claim (in the postfaced dedicatory letter of On Learned Ignorance, which Nicholas finished writing on 12 February 1440) that he had chosen to write on this metaphysical topic because of a shipboard experience of divine illumination while on the ship returning from this mission to Constantinople.

After a successful career as a papal envoy, he was made a cardinal by Pope Nicholas V in 1448 or 1449. In 1450 he was both named Bishop of Brixen, in Tyrol, and commissioned as a papal legate to the German lands to spread the message of reform. This latter role, his 'Great Legation' of 1450-2, involved travel of almost 3000 miles, preaching, teaching and reforming. He became known as the Hercules of the Eugenian cause.[6] His local councils enacted reforms, many of which were not successful. Pope Nicholas canceled some of Nicholas' decrees, and the effort to discourage pilgrimages to venerate the bleeding hosts of Wilsnack (the so-called Holy Blood of Wilsnack) was unsuccessful. His work as bishop between 1452 and 1458 – trying to impose reforms and reclaim lost diocesan revenues – was opposed by Duke Sigismund of Austria. The duke imprisoned Nicholas in 1460, for which Pope Pius IIexcommunicated Sigismund and laid an interdict on his lands. Nicholas of Cusa returned to Rome, but was never able to return to his bishopric.

He died at Todi in Umbria on 11 August 1464. Sigmund's capitulation came a few days after Nicholas's death.[7]

Tomb in S.Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, with the relief "Cardinal Nicholas before St Peter" by Andrea Bregno

Upon his death, Cusanus's body was interred in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, probably near the relic of Peter's chains; but it was later lost. His monument, with a sculpted image of the cardinal, remains. Two other tombstones, one medieval and one modern, also are found in the church. In accordance with his wishes, his heart rests within the chapel altar at the Cusanusstift in Kues. To this charitable institution that he had founded he bequeathed his entire inheritance: it still stands, and serves the purpose Nicholas intended for it, as a home for the aged. The Cusanusstift houses also many of his manuscripts.[1]

Nicholas of Cusa was noted for his deeply mystical writings about Christianity, particularly on the possibility of knowing God with the divine human mind — not possible through mere human means — via "learned ignorance". Cusanus wrote of the enfolding of creation in God and their unfolding in creation. He was suspected by some of holding pantheistic beliefs, but his writings were never accused of being heretical.[8] Physicist and philosopher Max Bernhard Weinstein wrote that Nicholas was, to a certain extent, a Pandeist.[9] Nicholas also wrote in De coniecturis about using conjectures or surmises to rise to better understanding of the truth. The individual might rise above mere reason to the vision of the intellect, but the same person might fall back from such vision.

Theologically, Nicholas anticipated the profound implications of Reformed teaching on the harrowing of Hell (Sermon on Psalm 30:11), followed by Pico della Mirandola, who similarly explained the descensus in terms of Christ’s agony.

Most of Nicholas of Cusa's mathematical ideas can be found in his essays, De Docta Ignorantia (Of Learned Ignorance), De Visione Dei (On the Vision of God) and On Conjectures. He also wrote on squaring the circle in his mathematical treatises.

The astronomical views of the cardinal are scattered through his philosophical treatises. They evince complete independence of traditional doctrines, though they are based on symbolism of numbers, on combinations of letters, and on abstract speculations rather than observation. The earth is a star like other stars, is not the centre of the universe, is not at rest, nor are its poles fixed. The celestial bodies are not strictly spherical, nor are their orbits circular. The difference between theory and appearance is explained by relative motion. Had Copernicus been aware of these assertions he would probably have been encouraged by them to publish his own monumental work.[10]

Like Nicole Oresme, Nicholas of Cusa also wrote about the possibility of the plurality of worlds.[11][12]

In medicine he introduced an improvement which in an altered form has continued in use to this day. This improvement was the counting of the pulse which up to his time had been felt and discussed in many ways but never counted. ...Nicholas of Cusa proposed to compare the rate of pulses by weighing the quantity of water run out of a water clock while the pulse beat one hundred times. ...The manufacture of watches with second-hands has since given us a simpler method of counting, but the merit of introducing this useful kind of observation into clinical medicine belongs to Nicholas of Cusa.[13]

In 1433, Nicholas proposed reform of the Holy Roman Empire and a method to elect Holy Roman Emperors. Although it was not adopted by the Church, his method was essentially the same one known today as the Borda count, which is used in many academic institutions, competitions, and even some political jurisdictions, in original form and a number of variations. His proposal preceded Borda's work by over three centuries.[14]

Nicholas' opinions on the Empire, which he hoped to reform and strengthen, were cited against papal claims of temporal power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Protestant writers were happy to cite a cardinal against Rome's pretensions. Protestants, however, found his writings against the Hussites wrong. Nicholas seemed to Protestants to give the church too much power to interpret Scripture, instead of treating it as self interpreting and self-sufficient for salvation, the principle of sola scriptura.[15]

Nicholas' own thought on the church changed with his departure from Basel. He tried arguing that the Basel assembly lacked the consent of the church throughout the world, especially the princes. Then he tried arguing that the church was unfolded from Peter (explicatio Petri).[16] This allowed him to support the pope without abandoning ideas of reform. Thus he was able to propose to Pius II reform of the church, beginning with the pope himself. Then it was to spread through the Roman curia and outward throughout Christendom.[17]

Accordingly, since by nature all men are free, any authority by which subjects are prevented from doing evil and their freedom is restrained to doing good through fear from penalties, comes solely from harmony and from the consent of the subjects, whether the authority reside in written law or in the living law which is in the ruler. For if by nature men are equally strong and equally free, the true and settled power of one over the others, the ruler having equal natural power, could be set up only by the choice and consent of the others, just as a law also is set up by consent.[18][19]

Shortly after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, Nicholas wrote De pace fidei, On the Peace of Faith. This visionary work imagined a summit meeting in Heaven of representatives of all nations and religions. Islam and the Hussite movement in Bohemia are represented. The conference agrees that there can be una religio in varietate rituum, a single faith manifested in different rites, as manifested in the eastern and western rites of the Catholic Church. The dialog presupposes the greater accuracy of Christianity but gives respect to other religions.[20] Less irenic but not virulent, is Cusanus' Cribratio Alchorani, Sifting the Koran, a detailed review of the Koran in Latin translation. While the arguments for the superiority of Christianity are still shown in this book, it also credits Judaism and Islam with sharing in the truth at least partially.[21]

Cusanus' attitude toward the Jews was not always mild; on 21 September 1451 he ordered that Jews of Arnhem were to wear badges identifying them as such. The De pace fidei mentions the possibility that the Jews might not embrace the larger union of una religio in varietate rituum, but it dismisses them as politically insignificant. This matches the decrees from Cusanus' legation restricting Jewish activities, restrictions later canceled by Pope Nicholas V.[22]

Nicholas was widely read, and his works were published in the sixteenth century in both Paris and Basel. Sixteenth-century French scholars, including Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and Charles de Bovelles, cited him. Lefèvre even edited the Paris 1514 Opera.[23] Nonetheless, there was no Cusan school, and his works were largely unknown until the nineteenth century, though Giordano Bruno quoted him, while some thinkers, like Gottfried Leibniz, were thought to have been influenced by him.[24]Neo-Kantian scholars began studying Nicholas in the nineteenth century, and new editions were begun by the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften in the 1930s and published by Felix Meiner Verlag.[25] In the early twentieth century, he was hailed as the 'first modern thinker',[26] and much debate since then has centered around the question whether he should be seen as essentially a medieval or Renaissance figure. Societies and centers dedicated to Cusanus can be found in Argentina, Japan, Germany, Italy and the United States. His well known quote about the infinity of the universe is found paraphrased in the Central Holy Book of the Thelemites, The Book of the Law, which was "received" from the Angel Aiwass by Aleister Crowley in Cairo in April 1904. " In the sphere I am everywhere the centre, as she, the circumference, is nowhere found".

In The Pursuit of God (1948), A.W. Tozer refers to Nicholas as someone who had a vibrant Christian spirituality, stating in Chapter 7, "I should like to say more about this old man of God. He is not much known today anywhere among Christian believers, and among current Fundamentalists he is known not at all. I feel that we could gain much from a little acquaintance with men of his spiritual flavor and the school of Christian thought which they represent…"

Apologia doctae ignorantiae (The Defense of Learned Ignorance) (1449), a response to charges of heresy and pantheism by the Heidelberg scholastic theologian John Wenck in a work entitled De ignota litteratura (On Unknown Learning).[29]

Idiota de mente (The Layman on Mind) (1450). This is formed of four dialogues: De Sapientia I-II, De Mente III, and De staticis experimentis IV.

De visione Dei (On the Vision of God) (1453), completed at the request of the monks of the Benedictine abbey at Tegernsee.

De pace fidei (1453), written in response to the news of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks.

De theologicis complementis, in which he pursued his continuing fascination with theological applications of mathematical models.

De mathematicis complementis (1453)

Caesarea circuli quadratura (1457)

De beryllo (On the Beryl) (1458), a brief epistemological treatise using a beryl or transparent stone as the crucial analogy.

De aequalitate (1459)

De principio (1459)

Reformatio generalis, (1459) a treatise on the general reform of the church, written at the request of Pope Pius II, but generally ignored by the Pope and cardinals.[29]

Bond, H. Lawrence (ed.), Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, Classics of Western Spirituality, (New York: Paulist Press, 1997). ISBN0-8091-3698-8 [Contains translations of On Learned Ignorance, Dialogue on the Hidden God, On Seeking God, On the Vision of God, and On the Summit of Contemplation.]

^Morimichi Watanabe and Thomas M. Izbicki, “Nicholas of Cusa: A General Reform of the Church,” in Nicholas of Cusa on Christ and the Church: Essays in Memory of Chandler McCuskey Brooks for the American Cusanus Society, ed. Gerald Christianson and Thomas M. Izbicki (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), pp. 175-202.

^Morimichi Watanabe, "The origins of modern Cusanus research in Germany and the establishment of the Heidelberg Opera Omnia," in Nicholas of Cusa: In Search of God and Wisdom: Essays in Honor of Morimichi Watanabe by the American Cusanus Society, ed. Gerald Christianson and Thomas M. Izbicki (Leiden: Brill, 1991), pp. 17-42.

Cusanus-Portal (DFG-Project by the Institut fuer Cusanus-Forschung and the Center for Digital Humanities at the university of Trier with a digitized version of the ‘Opera Omnia’, the critical edition of the Latin texts from Nicholas of Cusa, published by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, with the English translations of Jasper Hopkins, several German translations, a German encyclopedia and an international bibliography)

Jasper Hopkins, Ph.D. has produced English translations with some commentary of much of Nicholas's work. PDF versions are available at this site.